I want to begin this story with a
movie that is close to my heart for many different reasons, but foremost,
because it is about life in the most ordinary, extraordinary sense. One of my
absolute favorite movies is The Curious
Case of Benjamin Button; it is one that has always left me in awe as the
credits roll up.
Button
is the story of a man who is aging backwards – he is born old, as a baby, and
grows into a young man as he gets older. The body is old, but the mind is
young, and those two switch places as we follow him through his entire life.
There is wisdom in the words of that film that will ring true in me until I
die. “I hope you make the best of it. And
I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt
before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live
a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the
strength to start all over again.” But I digress.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve
always believed in signs, which is why the Nabokov story has captivated me, and
why I love the smallest words and phrases that I have scribbled in my “notes”
from this class. I was that strange child who saw things…just a little bit
differently than the other kids my age, was interested in something deeper,
though I didn’t know what that was. I still don’t – I don’t know that I ever
will.
I have a very dear friend who is the
same way. She’s currently living in Austria, but if there is one other person
in my life who shares my belief in the little things, it’s her. We’ve been
writing since we were little. If you’ve heard me speak in class about how I
identify with trees, how some people say that I am a tree, it began with her. I’ve always loved them. To this day,
I go back to the Aspen Grove along the Boulder River in the Absoarka’s where
I’ve been camping with my family since I was little, and I still feel a peace
sitting among them that I’ve felt nowhere else but in the arms of my soul.
The connection I feel with trees is
the same connection my friend feels with birds. I have always been the tree,
and she has always been the bird. If anamnesis or reincarnation does indeed
happen, then at some point we were these creatures.
This is all leading somewhere, I
promise you.
I have one younger brother; his name
is Josh. While I have a huge family with so many aunts, uncles, and cousins, he
is my only sibling. We weren’t the typical siblings who fought constantly when
they were younger or in middle school; we’ve always gotten along so well. This
year is his freshman year at MSU – he’s following in our father’s footsteps and
obtaining his Mechanical Engineering degree. I’ve spent my whole life
protecting him, taking care of him as well as he’ll let me, so it was funny
that I would be new at MSU the same year he would be. A chance to keep an eye
on baby brother during his first “crazy” year of college? Check a happy yes.
I never wanted to go to school at
MSU; it was where all (ha –
exaggeration is always amusing when you’re 21 looking back on 18) my fellow
classmates went after they graduated. And yet, after two years out of state,
and one of the most amazing trips in my life, deciding to transfer to Montana
State University was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Life is a series
of circumstances, changing perceptions, and love. All three led to where I am
now, and to what happened last November.
The weekend of November 3rd,
2012, my boyfriend Cody and I went home because the wedding of two of his good
friends from his ranching community was taking place. Josh, not having any
obnoxious Calculus homework that weekend, decided to go along and see his
friends he’d graduated with that still lived in Miles City.
The Saturday evening of the wedding
for us was late night in Austria, where my friend was watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with
a group of people she was studying abroad with; we share a love of this movie.
While Cody and I were dancing at the wedding, she was watching it. In the film,
there is a character named Daisy who is a ballerina, and there is a beautifully
tragic scene partway through where she is hit by a car. All of the
circumstances leading up to that one event are shown first, and the scene ends
with the quote, “But life being what it
is - a series of intersecting lives and incidents, out of anyone's control -
that taxi did not go by, and that driver was momentarily distracted, and that
taxi hit Daisy, and her leg was crushed.”
When the movie finished, my friend
looked at one of her friends and said, “Something bad is going to happen, Gwen.
I know it. Just like with Daisy. I can feel it.” She couldn’t shake the inkling
– she went to bed.
The wedding had ended; Cody had
dropped me off at home and I’d said a goodnight to my parents, who were waiting
for Josh to get home from hanging out with his friends. I fell asleep quickly,
my feet aching from all of the dancing we’d done.
Later that night – 2 am, as I would
later realize – I was dreaming. I couldn’t tell you about what, but at the end,
a horrific boom jolted me awake – one that I’d assumed had been in my dream.
Minutes later, my mother was at the door: “Josh has been in an accident.”
In the midst of this, I texted my
friend in Europe, telling her that my brother was in an accident, and asking
for her prayers for him.
It was three blocks away from my
house – the pickup had hit a tree. The scene of the accident was a nightmare
that is a blur of images and flashing red lights for me; one that I try hard to
not remember. I thought he was dead. I saw the pickup smashed against the tree,
and thought for sure he was dead; seeing him in the ambulance alive, but in
pain was as much of a relief as it was a horror. His femur had snapped clean in
two, but that was all we knew. No one was telling us much else, but he would
have to be airlifted to Billings. It was a long few hours in the hospital.
At the same time all of this was
happening, it was late morning in Austria. My friend was walking across campus,
back to her building. She was about to walk by the computer lab, when a little
bird landed by her feet, looked up, and whistled at her. Immediately, she went
to the lab, checked her messages, found mine, and found her gut had been right.
The tree and the bird.
It was the hardest thing I’ve ever
been through – brought on by one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. If one
thing had been different – if I hadn’t transferred to Bozeman, if Jimmy and
Lavonne hadn’t gotten married that weekend, if I’d invited Josh to come to the
wedding with me, if I hadn’t invited him to come home with us this weekend, it
would never have happened.
In some way, it was my fault. And,
yet in some way, I saved him.
The pickup hit a tree that night
– a small cottonwood that looked so thin to me I couldn’t believe it was still
standing. But it had hit that tree,
and if it hadn’t, it would have gone
straight through the wall five feet behind it, and my little brother would have
been killed.
Kelse said it with written words,
the way that we speak best. “You. You are the tree. And the tree stopped him.
You buffered him. Just like you always do. You had to buffer your brother from
the worst of the world.”
All of this happened before
Mythologies. But throughout this class, this one event is what I have been
coming back to, what I’ve centered around, and that was never shown more
clearly than in my displacement myth of the story of Phaethon. Phaethon dies –
and writing that story, writing what didn’t happen in real life to me, to my brother,
was one of the most healing things that I have ever experienced.
What this class has taught me,
and what I think I’ve always known, is that I’ve always been a “mythic
detective” of sorts. This class has been the glasses I needed to see clearly. I
will forever carry them around in my pocket for those unexpected moments, huge
or small, that present themselves every day in ways that are a thousand years
old, and yet as new to me as the different light I open my eyes to every
morning.
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| Copyright K. Weyebacher 2013 - "I found youuuuuuuu." |
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